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Sunday, April 11, 2010

5 Videos From Last Year's Tenno Sai - better late than never...

Note: if you're reading this using Blogsherpa, you may have to click over to the blog proper to watch the videos. I don't think Blogsherpa supports YouTube. Thanks!

Now, that I've discovered the joys of YouTube, there's no stopping me. I dug out all the tapes from last year, and dutifully edited and uploaded most of them. I'm not an iMovie master, in fact, I'm anything but. I still can't figure out how to speed up the video without a tragic loss of quality - as it is happening to my clips right now.

So, there's plenty of room for improvement.

For now, I can present you the whole Tenno Sai series. I've written about this festival, which took place on July 18th 2009 here and here. In those previous posts I showed you plenty of pictures, but now I can show you plenty of videos. Ha! Ain't I awesome? And it's only a year later! Whoa! My speed is amazing!

And I tried to get them all in HD, whatever that means, because if you're going to torture yourself watching amateur YouTube videos, you might as well do it without trying to scratch your eyes out.

So, here you have them there kids doing wadaiko (taiko drumming). They were pretty good:

And here you have mikoshis (mikoshi? not sure what the plural of "mikoshi" would be in English) leaving the Utsunomiya Castle Park.

And more mikoshi getting ready to parade all the way to Futara shrine:

In reality, the exodus from the castle grounds went on for hours, there were 35 mikoshi (mikoshis?) if I remember correctly. Mercifully, I cut it all down to 10 minutes total, and that's for two clips combined. How's that for efficient editing, huh?

OK, after leaving the castle grounds, they paraded through the city, and it started raining. We caught up with them on Orion-dori (Orion street), which is basically one big pedestrian mall:

And because Orion-dori has a roof, it wasn't raining. The video ends rather abruptly when the red team leader asks me to join the mikoshi carriers.

And here is the final episode when the mikoshi teams arrive at Futara Shrine:

Now that we're done with 2009 festivals, I will try to be more timely with the upcoming 2010 season.